During this Sunday’s regular maintenance window we will be upgrading the operating system on the Juniper network switches. Each switch will need to be restarted after the upgrade and thus there will be a 5 minute network outage for the local network served by each switch in the following buildings at some point between 7 am and 10 am Sunday morning:

Soon after the launch of the new Middlebury web site, the LIS website team conducted usability testing on the LIS parts of the site (see report 1, report 2). Many improvements have been made based on the feedback received during testing. Since part of the Team’s charge for this year included following-up on these recommendations, we thought it best to share some of the highlights. These changes were made with the help of many content managers and website editors; we thank you for your contributions!:

improved Google search has recently been implemented on the whole Middlebury site, which has already made searching for LIS content much easier

Remember, there’s also an option for anyone to report issues with a page using the Problems with this Page? button, and you can get in touch with LIS Content Managers by finding them at go/liscm.

What’s next? We’re moving on from following-up on the old recommendations to working on marketing strategies for the site, and soon afterward, another round of testing, likely in the form of a user needs analysis and more usability testing. Feel free to send us feedback any time. Thanks!

The Monterey Institute of International Studies is hosting a Tedx event. TED refers to the wildly successful annual conferences that bring together people from technology, entertainment and design to give short talks about their lives. Tedx events are community organized programs that following a similar format to the TED conferences.

TedxMonterey is happening on April 15 and will be livestreamed and live-interpreted to the web. Speakers will include dancers (including Middelbury’s Andrea Olsen), drummers, environmentalists, researchers, entrepreneurs and artists.